Walmart’s Horrific Treatment of Workers is too big to Ignore

Monday, December 17, 2012

“In our search for this “Welfare Queen,” we were looking for actual people when we should have been looking for corporate people. We should have been looking at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer and brought in more revenue in 2011 than any other company in the nation. But because of the “everyday low wages” that the retail giant pays its employees, the Wal-Mart workforce represents the largest recipient of federal aid in the nation.”

The CEO of Walmart, Mike Duke, doesn't see a problem with how little he pays his 2.2 million employees worldwide, even though many of them earn such low wages that they are forced to collect public aid to survive, leaving you, the tax payer, responsible for paying corporate welfare. Duke also had the brass to say, “We will not buy from an unsafe factory,” just weeks after 112 people were killed in a garment factory fire that supplied Walmart with clothing.

Protesters joined Wal-Mart workers in front of the Council on Foreign Relations to protest the policies of Wal-Mart’s CEO Mike Duke, holding him accountable for paying workers a low minimum wage, forcing many to file for public assistance, retaliating against workers when they began to organize and to speak out about working conditions and the mistreatment of workers.

The title here says it all. But while Walmart's horrific business practices have been written about and documented for years, this is the first time that workers have walked out of the stores to demand better conditions. Because these brave workers are not unionized, they put everything on the line by walking out, including their jobs.

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The great American middle class wasn’t something that just happened – it was built brick by brick. It was built by soldiers returning from war and a government that repaid them by giving them a shot at college.

What the wealthy and well-connected figured out is that they have strength in numbers: the numbers of dollars they contribute to politicians. It’s time working and middle class Americans use our strength in numbers to reclaim the American Dream. We need a counterweight to the power of big money – and that’s the power of big numbers, the power of ordinary people who work for a living demanding to have our voices heard – from the workplace to Washington.